In the old days (ie, Easter weekend, about a month ago), a Bank Holiday weekend meant an extra hangover day. But this weekend I was extra good and used the long weekend to actually do stuff.
The weather was nice on Sunday so I decided it was time to start The Garden Project. The first thing to do was actually try and see the grass for the, err, grass. At least 3 ft high, the meadow masquerading as a lawn was the first thing to tackle. We’ve only got a very small, not very powerful lawn mower, so it took quite a lot of effort to get through it. It also became pretty obvious pretty quickly that the grass was actually quite a lot of weed.
Oh, and we found a visitor in the undergrowth.
Mowing the grass was pretty hard work, so I left that to himself, while I focused on the bindweed and the patio weeds, along with clearing out and preparing pots, ready for new flowers. There is much more work to do on the patios, just to get the rest of the moss off and jetwash them again, but for now it was more a case of making the garden presentable than anything else.
After a couple of hours we whizzed off to the garden centre and decided to buy some herbs to start a small kitchen garden, along with some tomatoes and peppers. We bought tarragon, thyme and mint, to go with the rosemary and sage we still had from last year. We also bought a few little flowers, as these are supposed to encourage the hover flies, which eat the nasty bugs that eat the plants. That’s the theory anyway. You can tell I’ve read up on this – not!
So we got back, in proud possession of a rake and about fifty quid’s worth of plants, but which time we were pretty knackered. So we finished off the grass, collecting eight bags of cuttings in the process – which is pretty amazing considering how small it is, and planted our tomatoes and herbs.
I finished off the planting on Monday morning, and did a heroic trip to the tip with the garden rubbish. Along with most of Sussex it seems – clearly the hot weekend attraction round these parts.
So, providing I remember to actually water the plants we bought, I’m hoping this is the start of a very small, but productive kitchen garden. Next time I shall do the patios and perhaps cut the overgrown bushes back. It’s nice to see the garden looking better, for sure, and the aching muscles from a bit of hard work is quite nice too.
